CSWS Welcomes New Director & New Operations Manager

by alicee • July 6, 2016 • Comments Off on CSWS Welcomes New Director & New Operations Manager

Michelle McKinley (left) & Dena Zaldúa / photo by Alice Evans

June 27, 2016—The Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon welcomes two new leaders to its staff effective July 1, 2016.

Law professor Michelle McKinley has been appointed as the next director of CSWS. Dena Zaldúa was hired for the newly created position of operations manager.

Michelle McKinleyAs the Bernard B. Kliks Associate Professor of Law at the University of Oregon, Michelle McKinley teaches Immigration Law and Policy, Public International Law, International Criminal Law, and Refugee & Asylum Law.

The recipient of many research fellowships and other honors, Professor McKinley has published widely on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery. Her book Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700, is due out from Cambridge University Press in September 2016. She received the Surrency Prize in 2011 for her article of the same title. In 2014, when she was a fellow in residence at Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, she completed this book on enslaved women in colonial Latin America who used courts to litigate their claims to liberty. Professor McKinley has also received research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Newberry Library.

Professor McKinley has a long association with CSWS, beginning soon after her arrival at UO in 2007. CSWS supported her research with several CSWS Faculty Research Grants, and she also participated for many years as a member of the CSWS Advisory Board and as a coordinator or member of various CSWS research interest groups (RIGs), including the Américas RIG and the Law, Culture and Society RIG.

Dena Zaldúa
Dena Zaldúa will manage the day-to-day operations at CSWS in the newly created position of operations manager. A graduate of Williams College with a B.A. in art history and women’s studies (1998), she has worked previously in alumni relations and development for nonprofits, as a fundraising consultant and Spanish teacher, and most recently as development director at Parenting Now! in Eugene. She worked in development for 12 years at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, where as assistant director of development, she raised $4.6 million per year for the nonprofit civil rights law firm.

Ms. Zaldúa currently sits on the board of directors for the Jewish Federation of Lane County. As well, she is a member of Hispanics in Philanthropy and the Williams College Latina/o and Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Alumni Associations.

Ms. Zaldúa looks forward to working again in a “woman-centered organization that values people of color and LGBTQ people and thinks intersectionally.”

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About CSWS

For more than 40 years CSWS has funded feminist scholarship at the University of Oregon. Our mission is simple: we create, fund, share, and support research that addresses the complicated nature of gender identities and inequalities.

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